photo: e.bouman

maples along 44th street near my house

Johnny, 3 yrs. old

TURKEYS
by Mary Mackey


One November
a week before Thanksgiving
the Ohio river froze
and my great uncles
put on their coats
and drove the turkeys
across the ice
to Rosiclare
where they sold them
for enough to buy
my grandmother
a Christmas doll
with blue china eyes

I like to think
of the sound of
two hundred turkey feet
running across to Illinois
on their way
to the platter
the scrape of their nails
and my great uncles
in their homespun leggings
calling out gee and haw and git
to them as if they
were mules

I like to think of the Ohio
at that moment
the clear cold sky
the green river sleeping
under the ice
before the land got stripped
and the farm got sold
and the water turned the color
of whiskey
and all the uncles
lay down
and never got up again

I like to think of the world
before some genius invented
turkeys with pop-up plastic
thermometers
in their breasts
idiot birds
with no wildness left in them
turkeys that couldn't run the river
to save their souls

From sister Susan

let it snow let it snow let it snow!

ready on the set? action !
click here
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu99g28w411qzqj03o1_400.gif

Frans Wesselman
OWL, etching

11~11~11

A good day for ferrying to Poulsbo, the little fishing village across the water.

 

WHEN I WAS TEN

Standing on an ice floe
my own
Not very close to the one that my fourteen year old brother
had broken off and was poling around on
moving quickly through slushy waters.
Hearing my other brother's rifle bullets cut the day,
shattering clouds, my ears, making my face sting
thankfully disappearing over the white mountain range
 into lake Michigan
Watching my red boots fill with ice water
 Never thinking that this translucent raft
Could be pulled out through the gap, a one-way passage
Walking back home with my corduroy-jacketed brothers
Damp inside my wet mittens and soaking socks
frozen feet crunching across the twilighted snow
A red cardinal fluttering in my chest

e.bouman, 2011 

448

I died for Beauty – but was scarce

Adjusted in the Tomb

When One who died for Truth, was lain

In an adjoining Room –

He questioned softly “Why I failed”?

“For Beauty”, I replied –

“And I – for Truth – Themself are One –

We Bretheren, are”, He said –

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –

We talked between the Rooms –

Until the Moss had reached our lips –

And covered up – Our names –

—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

 

 

floated onto my deck

Living large in the Land of the Big Leaf Maple!

how lucky we are!

How to Like It

These are the first days of fall.  The wind

at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,

while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns

is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,

the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.

A man and a dog descend their front steps.

The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.

Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.

This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.

But in his sense of the season, the man is struck

by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories

which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid

until it seems he can see remembered faces

caught up among the dark places in the trees.

The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just

rip off their clothes.  Let’s dig holes everywhere.

Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud

crossing the face of the moon.  Like in a movie,

he says to himself, a movie about a person

leaving on a journey.  He looks down the street

to the hills outside of town and finds the cut

where the road heads north.  He thinks of driving

on that road and the dusty smell of the car

heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.

The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff

people’s legs.  Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.

In the man’s mind, the road is empty and dark.

Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,

where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,

shine like small cautions against the night.

Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.

The dog says, Let’s go to sleep.  Let’s lie down

by the fire and put our tails over our noses.

But the man wants to drive all night, crossing

one state line after another, and never stop

until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.

Then he’ll pull over and rest awhile before

starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill

and there, filling a valley, will be the lights

of a city entirely new to him.

But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.

Let’s not do anything tonight.  So they

walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.

How is it possible to want so many things

and still want nothing?  The man wants to sleep

and wants to hit his head again and again

against a wall.  Why is it all so difficult?

But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.

Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.

And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s

wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

as if into the place where the answers are kept—

the ones telling why you get up in the morning

and how it is possible to sleep at night,

answers to what comes next and how to like it.

—Stephen Dobyns (1941- )